Teleclass Transcript Cloe Madanes & Mark Peysha
07/19/10
CM: If you were not able to watch the Lise film and listen to the teleclass, watch the film later and then listen to the teleclass again because it will have a different meaning after you see the film.
MP: Yup, okay, so welcome to the teleclass everyone. Today we’re going to explore a concept called key decisions. Now all of us are making decisions every moment of our lives and there are some decisions that have such a powerful impact because they’re decisions that control hundreds and thousands of decisions that we make after. So, basically they’re like master decisions, for instance in the Lise intervention, that we’re going over today.
This is a story of Lise, 60 years old. She stood up and she spoke with Tony about a problem that she had with her marriage, and Tony -- she stood up and Tony saw that she was – she had a man haircut, she stood like a man, she had a very severe expression on her face. And so Tony talked to her about – you know, we’re going in more detail but he talked about the fact that she is kind of living like a man, and they traced the key decision that she had made early on in life. And so, in this case, in Lise’s case – you know they discovered the decision that she made when she was a little girl. And that she made a decision that – she decided as a little girl that being vulnerable and emotional was weak and that she could be strong by being tough. And so that decision ended up affecting her whole life, governing how she dealt with femininity, and vulnerability. Both her vulnerability and that of others had affected her life as a young woman, wife, mother, grandmother and mother in-law. The good news is that by going back to her key decision that she had made as a little child and with Tony’s assistance she was able to remake that decision in a fresh way and access the energy and the emotion and the potential that she had had before that decision was made. And then by remaking that decision she was able to really transform all the relations that have been affected by her key decision. She affected the lives of eleven people in her family just by making this decision – remaking this decision in relation to herself.
And so, in Latin the word decision means “to cut off” it has the same root as the word scissors or incision. And so when you make a key decision, you are necessarily cutting off other possibilities and that’s the meaning of the word. And so today when we talk about revisiting and remaking key decisions, we’re talking about going back to the past, identifying key decisions we’ve made and then revisiting what we’ve cut off when we made that decision. Sometimes it’s empowering to cut off certain meanings. Sometimes there are things in the past where we made a decision and it’s important to just decide what it meant that you did what you did and to move on. Other times it’s more empowering to revisit a key decision that is still limiting you and that maybe obsolete. That decision is not useful anymore, and so you go back and you can unmake it. Make a new decision right now, and uncover the potential that was before that decision. Because before any decision gets potential you have a variety of ways you can act and you make a decision and you choose one way. So if you go back and you can remake those decisions you can rediscover the potential and it was certainly clear in Lise’s case.
So in this Teleclass, we’ll start off by defining the key decisions, how they work and introducing a mega strategy which we help people in understanding decisions. The mega strategy is called “counter examples”. And so, let’s start by making few important points about key decisions. Key decisions are more intense than the decisions we make every day, because they were made under great stress. It’s usually in a situation where someone or something forced you to make the decision when it wasn’t comfortable to make the decision but still you have to decide even not deciding would have been a decision. So we’re under stress, we go into survival mode of fighter flight. And key decisions involve with dilemma, where you basically feels you have to choose between thing A and thing B. So like between, you know, what thing A and thing B are for you depends on your situation. So for instance, two of your family members might be fighting and you have to feel forced to take sides between one of them. Or someone you love may be giving you an ultimatum to do what they ask you to do or they’ll leave, and you have to decide. Someone close to you may have done something wrong and now you’re forced to take a choice between being loyal to your friend or lying to someone else. These are key decisions, and what’s important about key decisions is that, you are in a position of great stress. You’re forced to make a decision between two things A and B, and either decision you make cuts off other options. And whatever decision you make will create precedence in your life.
So in Lise’s case, where she was confronted by her father, she was -- she described him – for the sake of the people who haven’t seen this. He was a very large, fat man, very severe, very strong rules and used to punish his children for breaking the rules. She was young, she may be six or seven, she would break the rules and then she had the decision when he was – when approached her to punish her physically and beat her, she has to decide what she was going to do. She decided not to avoid him and not to cry when he punished her. So in other words in a sense, she’d behave like you know, a boy in a sense by…
CM: It was not – It wasn’t pun…Mark. It wasn’t punishment. He hit her and beat her up. It was child abuse.
MP: Yup, that’s a great point. Yeah, so we don’t condone physical punishment so we are – this is abuse. So, by having to be forced to make the decision she cut off her ability to be afraid or vulnerable later on in life, this decision controlled her behavior and other decisions for sixty years. So that’s the key decisions.
To summarize, it’s – so the question is how do you deal with a key decision? Let me give you another example of a key decision so you have another one. Sometimes the decisions are not conscious at all. Sometimes they’re just because of the way that our mind and nervous system think. We can make a decision unconsciously, especially under trauma. So here’s an example, I’ve told this story but I’ll just revisit it briefly, that when you receive a major shock and your mind responds by making a key decision.
This is a story of Tony intervention, where he was working with a man perceived by his family to be very cold and impersonal. It turns out that he had made a key decision when he was a young man, probably in his early 20’s. He was in the army on a train going through the hostile desert; he was feeling very emotional about rejoining his family. He was going to be with them on leave, he couldn’t wait to see them suddenly he fell off the end of the train and managed to hold on by one hand. He realized that he was completely alone, in the sense that if he didn’t get back on the train himself, he’d be left for dead in that desert. He climbed himself back up on the train but what his brain did in the mean time as he made it wrong to be emotional about your family. He made it wrong to be anticipating and looking forward to love and connection, because when he fell off, the first thing your brain does is look for an explanation for why you fell of the train. The brain perceived that the emotion of closeness had been there when he got hit. So this happens in trauma, it can also happen if you were, you know in a very happy time of life the suddenly you get hit by something shocking. Someone dies, you lose your business, you get fired, and you have a major health concern. Anytime you have that kind of shock, the brain tends to make it unconscious key decision, where you make whatever was happening before that wrong. So that was his case. It wasn’t even a decision that he was in a position to make. It just happened. And so Tony helped him recover the potential for that key decision and even though he had lived like that for over 40 years he was able to regain the warmth and the connection and the love of family and to be able to express that freely with his family for the first time.
So there’s three basic ways that we see that the people tend to respond to key decisions. They tend to normalize the key decision in which you block out; you forget the things that you cut off with the decision. Then secondly is that people reject the decision that they themselves made and they are haunted by this decision. It’s they – they’re never happy with it, they never get used to it and it stays painful. And the third thing and this is what we advocate and this is what you will see in the Lise film, is that they educated themselves about the decisions they’ve made. They think about the options. They understand the situation they had been in and they have compassion for themselves and then they make a new intelligent decision based on their best – the information that they have.
So, you know, I guess what we’ll do is I’ll go into the intervention and describe some of the ways that Tony got into the position of talking to Lise about her key decision. It’s a beautiful piece of intervention work and within a very few minutes he gets very deep into Lise’s life and understanding her world. So, it started in somewhat unusual way Lise stood up with a question about her arguments with her husband. She said that her problem with it is she suddenly gets shaky, frightened and she cries, that confused her, made her feel weak; she said that she hated that. Tony recognized that she was experiencing vulnerability for probably the first time in many years and so he decided to give this vulnerability a new meaning, something that could transform her life in a positive way, so we took a risk. When Lise said how much she hated that feeling of being scared, he said of course you do look at you you’re a man. Now for the people who have seen this film. We are going to see this film, I guess everybody here. In this training we don’t teach blunt confrontation. Tony confronts her in a way that we don’t recommend for anyone here, it’s advanced and controversial approach especially when it comes to gender because people are very sensitive about gender. But generally when someone comes to you for coaching…
CM: Let me add something there. You have to be very experienced to be able to do this. There’s nothing wrong in doing it. It’s just that if you’re not very experienced it can backfire. So even I very rarely use confrontation, and if I use it, I use it in a humorous way. But if Tony of course is such a great artist in this and he can do it and he knows how to do it.
MP: He knows exactly how much goodwill he has built up. He can see from the person’s physiology how far along they are in terms of trusting him. So he knows how to test that level with many people would just check out if you confront them bluntly. In fact, what we would be talking about today is the mega strategy that allows you to avoid this kind of confrontation and get things done in a much more effective way.
So anyway, so Tony perceived that Lise will be having this experience more and more and based on her very masculine physiology, Tony saw that Lise had made some powerful key decisions in her life that were worth understanding.
CM: Let me add something there. Excuse me. Mark, excuse me for interrupting. I was actually in the room when Lise stood up. I was at the other end of the room and I thought she was a man, and all the people around me thought that she was a man.
MP: This was not a mild thing. Exactly this was not a mild thing. And so when he said this is another point of just about the confrontation so we have a full understanding. When Tony said that you’re a man, he was testing also to see how she’d responded. So if she would [Inaudible][0.12.36.8] would have a strong emotional response and he would have seen that she was capable of going into her feminine mode. And that he would have moved on and find another way to work with her. So instead, she responded in a very masculine way, meaning very low emotion more kind of mental confusion, cognitively trying to figure out you know, furrowing her brows, but she wasn’t offended or hurt in any way and that was kind of a sign that she was kind of toughened up. So Tony reassured her instantly that he did not mean any criticism, that he wants her to have what she deserves and that in order to give this a new meaning he told her a story.
And so, the story started when Tony started talking about a methodological discipline-driven man who is going through a parade. Everyone else is having fun and celebrating, it was a political parade. This man was driven by a single outcome to kill Richard Nixon, who was the politician in the middle of this parade. Suddenly he bumped into an elderly woman and she held his hand and said “Sorry, are you okay?” and gave him all this feminine love and connection. From that experience of this woman’s caring and vulnerability the would-be assassin found himself unable to fire the shot and he didn’t want this woman to be traumatized so he didn’t do it. This is from this man’s autobiography.
The point of the Tony story was to present to Lise the power of femininity. Just imagine, this is a very masculine person – looking person and he just confronted her and said she’s living her life as a man and then he’s trying to show her other ways of being. So, he gave her this positive example of a woman used to that kind of power in Lise’s stage in life. T he purpose of this story was to give a counter example. This is the mega strategy that we are talking about. When someone is deeply stuck in a limiting belief system or a point of view, a great way to draw them out is to tell them a story. When people listen to a story they tend to have a suspension of disbelief. So you basically believe in the story that is real in the way you’re listening to it. Tony began the story and there was a – he told it very artfully so that he start by associating with the bad guy and that surprises you when the hero is this grandmother at the end of the story.
So Lise responded to saying that she was confused and so the counter example worked. Often when you give someone a counter example it’s a – people will react by confusion because you’re allowing them – they’re allowing – confusion is a sign that they are opening up their minds to thinking about things in a different way. The next counter example Tony used with her is to ask her whether she ever danced naked, this was a pattern of kind of a shocking counter example. And then he – there’s another counter example where he asks her about her father and this is expanding the unit. So the person you find out – if you have… Let me back up here. If you have a gender issue often with women, if you have – if she is – if you see a woman who is uncomfortable with her femininity you ask about her parents. And so bottom line when she – when Lise talked how she had been hit by her father and how she had become stronger and firmer and tougher and more resilient in relation to him, Tony asked her a question. The question was, what would have happened if she had responded differently to her father’s violence, what if she had cried and gone crazy.
Cloe did you want to say something?
CM: Yeah, basically he didn’t say what would have happened if she had responded differently. I believe he just said, “What would have happened if you had cried?” She said, “Well, I have an idea because my sister cried and she didn’t get hit.”
MP: Yeah, exactly and so…
CM: So the question has to be very concrete not what would have happened, but give the counter example “What would have happened if you had cried?” And then immediately, the image comes to mind, and she remembered her sister crying and not getting hit.
MP: Yes, exactly and so she responded by asking some questions about you know – when she realized all she have to say was my sister cried and he stopped and Tony said “that’s right.”
CM: No he never hit her sister, her sister cried before even getting hit.
MP: And Lise’s eyes – basically she realized that she had chosen this path. That this has been her key decision.
CM: What she saw as the only response was really a key decision and a choice.
MP: That’s right.
CM: Where the sister had chosen to be vulnerable and what bore the abuse.
MP: Yes, exactly. And so at this point in the film Tony was very gentle and compassionate and he said, “I know honey” and he helped her understand – when you see this film three of four of the biggest confusions of her life within a matter of 60 seconds. Lise, when she had realized that she had chosen this she told him she said, “I thought this was humiliating” and Tony said, “I know honey” and she said…
CM: But even more she said, “He was a good man and I loved him” and Tony said, “I know honey, I know that you still do.” That is the drama of the abused child that they still love their parents and 50 something years later she still love him.
MP: Exactly, and she also said, “He was a nice man.”
CM: And Tony said, “No.” It’s very important to clarify reality there. Tony said “No, he was not nice to you and I would beat him.”
MP: He said, “I would let him know in ways he was horrible and let him know.”
CM: He would never forget. Yeah
MP: So the point here is that Tony achieved in a few short minutes – he got to one of the core decisions of someone’s life by using the mega strategy of counter example. And so the point here , in terms of the counter examples, is whenever you are working with someone with a problem, you have to begin with the assumption that the person is entrenched in a way of work that is limited. I don’t mean that you think this in a critical way, you just have to observe that a person has a certain style, everyone does… of behaving and acting and believing and these are not something they are born with its not genetic. You have to think of a person that this is a product of a decision they’ve made and at some time in the past they’ve made a key decision as all of us have. And so, and this is true of all of us, anyone whose made a key decision like that is often not accessing all the potential in themselves and in their situation.
When people are stuck on a problem they tend to defend and avoid the problem that’s been handled. They defend themselves they are sensitive to criticisms. They draw a circle around the problem and say no, no, no, this is how it is “I had to do it, I had no choice.” And so it’s important to be skilled as a coach. You don’t want to – It’s important to be sensitive and kind and compassionate and understanding but also to be skilled at doing the opposite, at providing counter examples, different ways of looking at things, different ways of taking actions, different ways that other people do things and different ways that you can react. So for instance when Lise said that she felt scared and cried Tony responded that vulnerability could be a good thing, right, complete opposite of what she believed. That’s when he told her the story.
CM: Okay, do you want me to – can I give an example of a different kind of revisiting a key decision, because Lise’s key decision was in great part in relation to her sister. Often when you have two siblings of the same sex they need to take opposite position with respect to the parents. So if one is crying and vulnerable, the other one has to be strong and hard. Actually that was my position in relation to my family. My sister as a little child was very vulnerable and I was very strong. It’s like you divide rows like that. It’s the same thing between brothers, but sometimes the key decisions can be taken later in life.
I want to give an example of a story of a situation where a woman made a key decision later in life that almost ruined her entire life. I think that this is worth telling the story with some detail.
This was a student of mine, a coach in a different city that was working with a Latin couple, helping them with marital differences, coaching the husband in his business. He had an international business that involves basically three continents and it was complicated. He had to travel a great deal. They have four little children and they were very well-off but still the money didn’t compensate for all the sacrifice of the travel, the distance and the little time that they have together. All of a sudden one day, the husband tells the coach that he suspects that the wife is being unfaithful to him and he has many clues. He actually knows who the man is. The woman is 35 years old, they have four little children under six. The wife who’s 35 years old is having an affair with a 22-year old. She has taken him out on their boat, she has been seen in public with him, their children have met him. She has not even concealed this. The husband is very upset; he’s very conservative, he’s very religious. He doesn’t know how to behave in this situation. He confronts the wife who takes a very defiant position saying that it’s not true, but even if it were, she’s her own person, she does what she wants, and she doesn’t want any criticisms or complaints, all attitude like this.
Then in the middle of the night one night, the husband calls the coach and says “I’m very concerned because I’m in the orient right now, I called the house the nanny answered the phone and said that my wife is locked up in her bedroom not responding and she ‘knocked and knocked on the door and can’t open the door and there’s no response.” So the husband said that “I’m afraid she might have made a suicide attempt, please go to the house.” So the coach arrived at the house in the middle of the night and finds that, yes definitely, they have to breakdown the door. The wife has taken an overdose. The coach told me it was very moving because their apartment was full of the pictures of their little children. And so this young mother with four little children was making a suicide attempt in a situation that seems completely crazy. So she asked me to – the coach asked me to intervene. So I said “I have to see the couple in person.” And so they came to see me.
The wife was so nervous that she couldn’t sit down. She stood against the wall, leaning against the wall and kind of shaking. And in a total defiant attitude, “I do what I want, I’m my own person, I don’t care, okay get a divorce, leave me.” The husband is saying, “This is not the woman I married, I don’t understand what happened.” Of course she’s denying she says, “It was just a friend, it was nothing.” It was clear that it was much more than just a friend. So I had to find some reason for this behavior, so I began to ask each of them about their family life. The husband had a tight knit family, very conservative family, very close together, very cooperative. The wife had troubled family, the father was a playboy type, the mother was exhausted from the father’s infidelity. She had a sister that was living with a man under uncertain circumstances. The tragedy in her life was that, a little over a year ago before this, her brother who was also playboy type and raced cars had died in an accident. It was the last race that he was going to do because he had you know, children also. And in his last car race he had an accident and died. She was completely overwhelmed by this because this was her older brother that she looked up to, and because her father was not really a father figure. Even though the brother was not a very good father figure either it was her father figure. She was overwhelmed by this.
So I said “Well, I have a diagnosis, I said to the husband, and I’d like to explain to you what the diagnosis of this situation means.” He said, “What is it?” and I said, “It’s temporary insanity. Your wife was temporarily insane because of her grief over her brother’s death. Sometimes when a person very close to you dies, you incorporate them and what she decided to do to keep him alive in some way is to become her brother. So she became reckless and she became like a playboy; flaunting relationships that were not appropriate and a risk-taker and the person that she was not. She was no longer the maternal woman that put her children first. She was not a loving wife that respected the marital vows to her spouse, she became her brother. That is temporary insanity.” And the husband said, “So, what do I do? What do we do?” And I said, “You have to heal her I cannot. You have to give her all the love and caring that you are capable of and much more than you’re capable of, until she heals and becomes herself again, she’s not insane anymore and she’s herself, she’s not her brother. Right now, she’s her brother.” The relief of the woman was amazing. She gave a sigh, her shoulders slouched and she sat on the chair. She put her head down, and she looked at me like saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
MP: Wow!
CM: I stayed very serious and I didn’t say anything to her and I said, “So, you have to heal her by loving her totally, completely with total compassion and understanding. This is grief over her brother’s death.” And so I coached the husband to just do that. It took an effort because from time to time he went back to his resentment. Also because the young man would not completely stay away; the husband would have to confront him a couple of times and tell him to go away or he would call the police and so on. He did that very well. They went back to being loving to each other and good parents to their children and it was over.
So in a sense this is an example of metaphor, because she took on metaphorically her brother. It’s an example of a key decision because at that death she decided to become her brother. So it’s an example of how a metaphor can be a whole way of living and how a key decision can happen into adulthood. Without my intervention, it would have been disastrous.
MP: Absolutely. That’s a great example because it shows you that when you’re – basically a great practical way to understand someone’s key decision. So here’s a person who’s not being the way they usually are, just totally switched, and what you need to do is understand that decision that led to that. Instead of dealing with the – reacting to the behavior; the outcome of the behavior of her being defiant and so forth, you need to understand her.
CM: Yes I was looking, I was asking the question that would lead me to understand, “At what point, when and why and how she decided to become this risk-taker, playgirl, crazy woman that she had not been up until that point.”
MP: Exactly. And so key decisions are usually – they’re very broad, so for instance they’re often “What are you against?” or “What is more important than something else?” or “Who’s on top?” “Who’s to be favorite more?” or how do you react to different situations that often they’re so instinctual, so in this case she probably didn’t even put it all together until you would have explained it to her. When she was able to understand her key decision they were able to work with it.
CM: Yes she had never thought of it like that. All she had thought of was how she had been overwhelmed by the horrible injustice of her brother’s death and by the total grieving for his children, for him, for his wife and the way she missed him. And didn’t realize at all that she had totally interjected him.
MP: Yup.
CM: So, Mark can I go on with some questions that are useful here to ask…
MP: That sounds great.
CM: ….to find out about these things. Okay so. Information in order to formulate a hypothesis about why; whatever is happening, whatever the problem or the challenge is that you’re presented with; whether it’s at work, at home, with a family, with friends, with your body, with your emotions. Okay, so you want to understand. “When does the problem or the challenge happens?” “How does it happen?” “Where and with whom?” For example in the case of this woman, it happened with a young man everywhere in the way that a callous playboy would behave. Not like a young mother.
You want to find out what is each family member doing or each colleague or each person at work, doing while the problem is happening. “How does it go away?” “Who is upset by the problem? Worried, sad, angry, embarrassed?” “Who has had in that circle, in that social circle or in that system, who has or has had a similar problem?” “Who resembles whom in the family?” Then you want to find out of all the people involved in that social system, what each one do. “What do they do for work?” “What do they do in school?” “Are they doing well or are they doing poorly?” “Do they have any special circumstances, concerns or worries?” “Who are they involved with?” And if you take relatives or colleagues, the person that is presenting the challenge to you, “Who does that person resemble?” “Whose problem is similar to that person?” “Who are closer together?” and “Who are further apart because of the challenge, because of the problem?” “What would change if the problem disappeared?”
So you have to ask these questions and you have to get as many people involved as you can to ask these questions. Of course you know the principle of simplicity is very important. So if you can solve the problem by just asking one person, that’s fine, but if you fail to solve the problem then you have to ask more people – more people that are involved.
MP: Uh-uh
CM: “Who gains because of the existence of the problem?” “What is the nature of that gain?” So as these issues become apparent then you are able to understand what are the metaphors involved and how to solve the challenge. So you want to know what is the metaphor expressed by the challenge. “What is the request or the command implicit in the behavior?” For example a request would be “Love me” or “Take care of me.” A command could be “Make me feel significant.” There’s a fine line between a request and a command actually.
“Who is the focus of the concern?” “Who is this related to?” and again “Who gains because of the problem behavior?” “How can that gain be maintained without the problem behavior?” “How can people be organized to help each other, instead of interfering with each other?” and “How can you restore a hierarchy, so that it’s a functional hierarchy?” or “How you can restore a couple to a more egalitarian relationship?”
MP: Great!
CM: You want to add something here Mark?
MP: Those are great – I think that’s a way of understanding things. Let’s talk about some different examples of problem and how you can understand it. This would be one where the woman starts to have the affair, and then you understood to apply this. You understood that the husband was away and that she was shutting herself up. That she had completely changed but it was – when you reach out and expanded the unit then understood the family circumstances. You are able to realize that was a resemblance between her behavior and the brother’s behavior.
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